Nicole Munoz in Pyewacket.AccuSoft Inc./The Globe and Mail
A recently widowed mother looking for a fresh start moves her alienated teen daughter out of town to an isolated cabin: This dim bit of parenting is the pretext for an equally weak-minded horror movie in which the angry girl performs an occult ritual in the woods and conjures up some evil spirit to kill mom. As a writer-director of thrillers, Adam MacDonald (Backcountry, about a couple stalked by a bear) has only one thing going for him here, and that is the wisdom to know that showing less is more scary: His conjuring of the pyewacket as a malevolent shadow is quite effective. Otherwise, the heavy-handed score, narrow performances (Nicole Munoz as the repeatedly terrified daughter; Laurie Holden as the dense mom) and weak dialogue all fail to justify a provocative ending that overturns the exorcising conventions of the genre.
Kate Taylor